“Special” mention
Cheers to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism for looking into the lack of proper attention to special children mired in poverty.
The last in a three-part series on special children, “Dilemmas on the ‘Different’ — Are you still ‘special’ if you’re poor?” (Jan. 6), zoomed in on a 16-year-old poor boy from Cavite who, as with 5.2 million Filipino children with special needs, has yet to receive legally mandated education.
The Department of Education (DepEd) lists children with special needs as those having learning disability, hearing impairment, visual impairment, mental retardation, behavioral problem, orthopedically handicapped/health problems, children with autism, speech defect, chronically ill, children with cerebral palsy, and children with multiple disorders. Mentally gifted children, or fast learners, are also classified as children with special needs.
The article explored the possible reasons why children with special needs do not receive the DepEd’s Special Education program. Among the reasons are financial difficulties (which, under the law, could be solved by requesting money from the Special Education Fund), logistical difficulties in charting cases of mental and physical disability among children, hazy coordination between the social welfare and education departments, and the lack of advocacy, promotion and support to education programs for special children.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by CMFR and Hector Bryant Macale, Melai Pinlac. Melai Pinlac said: RT @cmfr: Cheers to @PCIJdotOrg for looking into the lack of proper attention to special children httpss://bit.ly/g6VHzm #monitor #pjrr […]